If there are not many planets that show signs of possible life at all, then there are going to be very few where life has even possibly developed our kind of intelligence. There would be even fewer where there might be a technological civilization. Looking for a signal or sending one becomes a real needle in a haystack operation. If we could afford to send just a few signals, say by high powered laser, there would still be no point in funding it, because we would still need to send those signals to literally tens of thousands of near stars just because we haven't narrowed our search. If we could only afford to listen, we might be deciding to commit to a project that would have to run for hundreds of years, and the human race has been pretty reluctant to try such long term feats, and not real good at keeping civilizations going long enough to finish them.
On the other hand, if planets in vital zones are common, designing instruments to specifically look for signs of life on them makes more sense. If we find evidence of life, we can then look at other, easier to detect factors, such as how old the related stars are, and we end up with a list of places that might have advanced lifeforms with intelligence, and even technology such as radio. There's a fair chance we could work through that list in just a few years. It becomes a small enough project we could tackle it with what resources we have, and the people who start the project would live long enough to see the answers.
The payoff could still be huge! Just as huge as a more scattershot approach, for much less time and money. Imagine if we found ourselves talking with a civilization that had already figured out fusion power, or foolproof ways to keep nuclear war from happening, or some other technology we won't invent by ourselves for a hundred years, a thousand years, or more. That's the potential big payout. The next tier down might be things such as just finding a civilization that has already passed through a long industrial pollution phase and cleaned up its old toxic waste dumps and such. Just knowing that they managed not to kill themselves off with some of the things we worry about is pretty valuable even if we don't know the details. Maybe we find aliens that are really good at physics, but don't know as much about industrial chemistry as we do. They want to trade how to make flying cars for our advanced secrets of how to make paint that weathers well in sunlight.
There is no POV that developed in a vacuum, only to become fixed when its child died of a hard drug addiction. There certainly are people who have lost loved ones that way, but they have also been told, ever since old dragnet episodes, that LSD, Psilocybin, and even Pot, are addictive and lethal narcotics just like the Heroin that killed their loved one. Of course there's need to respect other people's POV's in a general sense, but all POVs are not remotely equal. If you are one one side or the other of a debate about rockets vrs space elevators, and some party enters the debate SHOUTING ABOUT GETTING TO THE MOON ON GIANT SWANS,, your first goal is not to accept the validity of that POV, it's to get the moron to either stop shouting the rest of the debate down or get educated fast, or both. Right now, Organized Crime LOVES the drug laws we have. They know how to exploit loopholes that keep their own employees in line and use the laws to go after their less organized competition. Every single person shouting for tougher drug enforcement is inadvertently standing next to a Mob boss, Mafia chief, or other racketeer, and giving them support. Now just how far should people who have figured this part out go in respecting the POV of the ones that haven't? Of course, the blanket pro legalization group has as many idiots as the blanket anti side, and I'm not personally advocating blanket legalization at all, but these people are not really doing the shouting, just sounding like stoned freaks who end up obscuring the rationalists on their putative side. If we shouldn't respect the Cheeches and Chongs out there, we should have even less respect for those who are still shouting "Tougher drug laws are the answer!"
One major branch of Buddhism doesn't see any need for gods - That's the Theravadist position. Do the meditation, get off the wheel. Mahayanists would probably say Theravada is good prep for moving into the full Mahayana tradition, and gods are part of the package but the goal is not to become a god but to become enlightened and then go back to get everyone else there. Vajrayanists would generally say there are gods, and then teach you how to make them useful tools for going further if that's needful, but the goal is not to become a magician that can command even gods, but to get enlightned and then make the decision whether to go back and help everyone else or not, except if you can make the decision, you already know which way you will decide. Theravadists mostly (not all), think the other branches have gotten into too complex models. So does Zen, except that Zen is mostly founded on Mahayana, and wants to avoid throwing out universal compassion with the bath water.
Some practicing Buddhists out there, feel free to shoot me down on this.
All right, I will prove right here that one god exists, hows that? (Although it's not one I'm particularly a follower of, just somebody else's god).
Apollo, Greek god of the Sun exists: Proof: For close to a thousand years, Apollo was seen as the god of harmony among other attributes such as music and solar light. His priests took their advice from adolescent girls who stayed in a cave, breathing fumes of various hallucinogenic plants, and then revealing their visions, and their visions controlled practically the whole civilization. In any normal situation, this would have been a ridiculous form of government. It would have lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes and never been considered again after the debacle that resulted. Unless a divine spirit of harmony acted through these stoned children, we would think of ancient Greece as just another bunch of peasants, not a center of enlightenment that gave us much of what is best about modern civilization and remains as stories of a golden age we should aspire to. Ergo, the god Apollo exists (or at least existed). The alternative is to believe Stoned Hippy Chicks babbling their dreams make the best form of government, and this is a clear case by Occam.
The problem with that is, if you assembled a typical jury, and polled them on the question "Should mrlibertarian accept the existence of God and more specifically become a Christian?" They would probably vote yes.
Plus a jury just has to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the evidence is sufficient to make whatever the prosecutions posits as an explanation is likelier than the invisible friend alternative. Probabable, not absolute.
There is a specific logical fallacy involved in trying to prove a universal negative. Formally, that fallacy is limited to certain circumstances and certain meanings of the word universal, but still, it's on the standard list of logical fallacies along with 'begging the question' and 'straw-man attacks'. There is no fallacy of assertion of universal positives on the standard lists. So the answer to your question is "Yes, that rule doesn't apply to universal positives".
Also, it would not be 'ironic' even if you had been otherwise right.
Back when the bible was written, planets were most certainly not unknown. The Hebrews even at the time they wrote the Torah were well aware of the same planets the Greeks, Romans and before them the Egyptians and Sumerians recognized. The Vatican hasn't constantly denied the existence of extraterrestrial life. They started denying the existence of extraterrestrial life during the counter-reformation. (from about 1545). The Vatican itself existed for at least 400 years before that time (founding estimated 1210), and the Roman Catholic Church for much longer. The most explicit offical denial came as part of the trial of Geordano Bruno in 1600. Bruno has often been described as a martyr to scientific thought, but it's worth noting that the church judges did not find Bruno's claims of a heliocentric cosmos or planets around other stars, or even life on such worlds, as grounds for his conviction and execution. The actual sentence cites Bruno's expression of pantheism as the only position actually, clearly heretical and worth execution. The Vatican isn't just now revising its stance on extraterrestrial life due to exoplanet discoveries - It rejected the positions of the counter-reformation as early as 1648, presumably including the denial of the posibility of extra terrestrials along with the rest of the things it threw out. It officially specifically allowed blanket publication of opinions on the subject by priests to the general public before 1950, resulting in several popular books, for example by Ftr. A Zubak in 1954. LeMatre published arguments as early as 1927 in the same paper where he described the formation of the universe from a monobloc of infinite density (the earliest form of the Big Bang theory) although as a good Catholic he put some of his notes through church review first. By all accounts, it was a pro forma review, even with ideas as spectacular as the Big Bang being proposed.
Note: I'm not a practicing Roman Catholic, nor was I raised as one.
Just think of how much value there might be if someone decided to shoot a film that was set up with multiple cliffhangers like an old republic serial, and they had less worry that they might be sued by the holders of Raiders?
Over-broad and over-extended copyright means when Peter Jackson gets interested in remaking King Kong, he has to worry about model dinosaurs that either have construction or markings too similar to Jurassic Park. He can't just call on an expert and try to make the most accurate T-Rex possible, he has to sweat what could happen legally if the 'most accurate' looks too much like someone else's T-Rex. this is on top of filming a depression era scene or twenty while having to pay someone to check that all the music used is public domain because some tune in the background just might still be protected. Remember in Kong how the 'studly' actor puts up posters of his earlier films on his cabin's walls? Those fictitious prop pieces had to be checked out by a legal department to see they were not too similar to any real film posters, because something might be still under copyright. How much do things such as this add to a film's costs?
The prevailing evidence is that the Moon is liberally covered with large round or roundish impressions, and yet there are still people arguing that there's no evidence Elephants have never set foot on the moon. Go figure! (Insert link detailing the sad lack of science education in the US).
Bacteria mutate faster than humans - that's not the same as evolving faster, and in fact can be the opposite.
1. Evolution happens because tiny, cumulative mutations can sometimes be advantageous. Big mutations almost never are - for some sizes of 'big' make that absolutely never. Humans, with 30,000 genes or so, can have many mutations that are tiny effects, so a few will be positive. Bacteria, often with only a few hundred genes, are stuck where almost any change is relatively big, so most of their mutations are negative to lethal (99.99999999% or so, as opposed to only about 99% for big multicelled complex things.).
2. Nature seems to be trying to make copying the reproductive code more accurate. The 'higher' plants and animals have much more error correcting applied to their DNA than less complex organisms. In fact, such 'steps forward' as sexual reproduction and keeping the DNA in the center of a nucleus, farther from some chemical agents that commonly damage it, all seem to reflect a trend in evolution towards reducing copying errors. However, the time that a species of advanced organism gives way to a successor looks shorter than for a 'primative organism', not longer. So more reliable copying, with fewer mistakes, must actually speed up species change, not slow it down.
This sounds counter to common sense - how can this be? Well, for just one factor, if you were a mutant, with an advantageous gene, it would probably only be a very small advantage (like I said in point 1). So for it to prove itself, it would take not just you having some slight benefits from it, but your kids, grandkids, and so on, over many generations. Now what happens if mutations are so frequent that the slightly better gene gets overwritten by new mutations before it has enough time to prove itself? Bingo, it can't be selected for - a higher mutation rate means less of the selection part of evolution.
(As I said, this is just one factor - a good college textbook on Evolution will likely mention several other arguments along this general line).
Real scientists have tried to calculate just how high a mutation rate actually slows down selection, and the best guess is even the most complex life forms are still evolving more slowly than they would with better error correction or a lower background radiation rate or other such factors. We (and the Oaks and Emus) are still evolving more slowly than the theoretical maximum with really tight error correction.
"OK, I need all you zombies to go over there and stand next to the propane tank. Yeah, hold hands and sing Kum-bi-Brainsi-yah or something. That's good."
I think you're failing to see how the steps in the process differ from physical invention: It's not that software is implemented based on predefined components, it's a question of where creativity is possible in the process (I'm using creativity in a broad sense, to include the word invention itself, and words such as 'originality' and even 'non-obviousness' when they are used to describe the patent process. I'll try to use some of those more specific terms to make this a little clearer).
As post #30588846 put it, the assembly of code is done in preconcieved ways. Someone already built a hardware framework that controls what you can create in software for a given purpose at one set of levels (essentially the bottommost levels - you can't, for example, make a deliberate spelling mistake to make a pun or coin a new word to create something novel and previously unforseen, as the system treats these as mistakes which won't execute). There are many non-obvious but still useful ways to arrange a very complex set of logic gates to make a processor, ergo that is patentable (or some parts of it are). There are no similarly non-obvious ways to arrange assembly language commands - A C, L, or ST, or even an SSCH does what it does, and its permissible uses are all documented. When you program above machine and assembly languages, you can't rearrange these to your own taste, as you can't even normally see them.
At the next set of levels, someone has created a programming language you are using. Unlike a natural language, it too is a very rigidly defined framework. Some choices may seem to be available, but there is often a precise ranking possible, in that one algorythm may be clearly superior to all others for the purpose. Doing something deliberately different is mostly also doing something deliberately inefficient, against standard, or just plain wrong. At neither of these two sets of levels can you actually do much if anything significantly creative. You also can't protect that level by patent because the legal system already forbids protecting the mathematics on which your work is based, and your implementation is a derivitive work of the sphere of math, so it can't have rights the math itself doesn't have.
Above that second set of levels, yes programming can be creative. But there, you're describing something similar to writing in a natural language. It's normally already protectable by copyright and so shouldn't gain simultanious protection from patent law. Some choices here are non-obvious, but non-obvious in more like the same way as choosing to use adjectives more sparingly and make the red-headed character be from out of state, not so much non-obvious in the 'tungsten makes a durable filament' manner.
I'm not saying I actually agree with all this, mind you. I think one of the points of both open ended scripting languages and of OOP is to make genuine creative choice available at deeper levels of the process. But, the court system is thinking of programming mostly as it was 20 or more years ago.
But if the judge cited copyright law as authority in his ruling, or even just agreed to accept a motion based on copyright arguments, that's simply not within his authority unless he's federal. Copyright law is federal only and the authority cannot be delegated even by act of congress, so sayeth SCOTUS.
I always though people bold parts of a definition because definitions are often complex, and in particular, have conditional parts. The definition you're addressing does have such parts (i.e. "often racism" and arguably ".etc"). You may note that Azaris boldfaced one of the conditional parts, and if you leave off that optional 'racism' part, is making the argument that there's no aggressive nationalism going on around here that could lend support to the definition of fascism being true now. Rather an odd claim to make, isn't that?
Regimenting industry means what it means. Taken at the most literal, it means something like arranging industries so they fall into neat groupings. I think "for the purposes of the arranger" is pretty much a 'gimmee' there, so if the arranger is the government, it moves a shade towards your 'taking control', but that's not exactly 100% overlap with the variation you propose.
Would you agree that there are a lot of people who move back and forth from industry boardrooms to government positions, often repeatedly? How do you tell industry taking control of government from government taking control of industry, when it's really the same people acting in the same way as they shift locations? Right now, Dick Cheney is reaping the benefits as a private citizen that began when he was secretary of Defense (if not earlier), were implemented in part while he was a board member of Haliburton up to 2000, and were still being developed during the period he re-entered public office as Veep.
You might want to study the German and Italian cases, as that's exactly the sort of thing that happened there - highly placed officials either moving back and forth from industry to government or using transparent proxies such as close relatives to control such industries while remaining in government (or vice versa). Don't worry about whether a given regimentation starts in industry or government, look at the people who drive the changes, what they want, and where they are going.
You know, Eisenhower didn't coin the phrase "Military-Industrial Complex" so people could still demand that it all originate with one side or the other. The whole point is they are blended together too much to know which initiatives start with the official government and which start elsewhere.
So, if companies are required to apply the same exaggerated requirements for skill-sets after they can't fill the job with US workers, and apply for the H1B process, then there's no reason to exaggerate. Ergo, listings such as "14 years experience with.Net 2.0 environment running on Core 2 quad processors" shouldn't exist (except as the result of very occasional typos). Yet, they do, in abundance.
Analogy: Fox news has labeled 18 republicans caught in affairs, homosexual encounters, or criminal acts as democrats. They have never made the same mistake in reverse. If you wanted to take the position that Fox wasn't motivated to do this deliberately, shouldn't the burden of proof fall to you to show how such a statistically one sided result could be caused by random typos, or otherwise not be proof of deliberate intent?
You somehow managed to build your point three out of ignoring that fact (unless. by "more skilled" you really meant 'have invented time machines to somehow acquire the necessary skills'). Point 2, on salaries, becomes unsupportable if your point 3 is wrong. If the job requirements can change drastically during the process of 'proving' an H1B is needed, then the government requirement has no teeth. So, you'd have to put up some actual figures about pay for broader classes of programmers rather than specific jobs. You certainly could gather figures and then make the claim that those '30% salaries' are an infrequent anomaly, but the other side has already gathered figures and made the claim that programmer wages have been depressed, as a whole, compared to other skilled professions. If the flat salaries situation exists, and low salaries in H1B positions exist, don't you have some proving to do? Sounds like you need to not only show that the mechanisms by which hiring at below prevailing rates affects related wages wouldn't be enough to depress wages in the broader industry as much as they allegedly have - you'd need to suggest some other causes.
I understand how you must feel about the characterizations to which you are responding. Unfortunately, you've made several unsupported claims, and given your very first sentence, you've done harm to your cause.
Apparently, he is claiming that copyright law should override contract law, and he's willing to urge suicide on people to make his point. Mickey, when somebody proudly announces that all the baby seals should be beaten to death with the bodies of the dead baby polar bears, they are a troll. Please don't feed the trolls.
Please see what I already posted to this thread. Human artifical selection is significantly different from natural selection in at least the two respects I cited. If human forethought is capable of mattering, we also can aim at a goal that isn't immediately optimum but might be better in some larger sense, and natural selection is always aiming solely at a local optimum, so that's a possible third difference. Natural selection tends towards the immediate good enough even if this closes off paths that might later lead to a long term best. (Some people would argue with human purposefullness making any difference in the world. I'm admittedly assuming that point here).
That's one way of looking at it, but: Nature doesn't really do the survival of the fittest, but of the adequately fit. On average. you see a lot more creatures gradually selected around a pretty broad average type, than you do intensely hyper-fit competitors playing an all or nothing game. Nature lets plenty of moderately fit members of a species survive most of the time, and being less fit than average often only means an organism has, on average.99 offspring while the fitter competitor has 1.01. Yes, sometimes an exceptionally fit creature hogs reproductive success and has 20 offspring while none of the competitors have any, but that's actually quite rare, and for the majority of species, makes little difference to the aggregate results.
Look at bighorn sheep. The males duel, prove their fitness exaustively, though rarely lethally, then the females just as often choose to mate with the losers instead. A bighorn male can win a lot of duels and still achieve only average reproductive success, and conversely, choosing to back down and let the bigger ram show off for the ladies often results in them watching the show, then picking the ram smart enough to know his limitations. Nature seems to allow just about anything to pass as fitness there, but the sheep have been naturally selected for an aggressive mating ritual anyway. For years, scientists assumed there was a lot of selection pressure there, and it was even the common textbook example of how sexual selection could probably modify a species more powerfully than other forms of natural selection, then they finally noticed the ewes weren't really exerting that pressure at all.
Nature also throws out environmental mods nothing can survive. Close enough to an asteroid strike or a shield volcano eruption, no creature proves to have the bit of extra fitness to cope.
Artificial selection is different here. Normally, we deliberately don't wipe out an entire animal population as part of a breeding program, without saving at least some percentage each generation. We also don't let a species just mosey along. If we want really big horns on sheep, we don't let the ewes pick, we choose for them, It's 100% enforcement of the rule that only the absolutely fittest survive, with us setting the definition of fittest as we arbitrarily choose. When we decide that fittest means, for example, the blue ones, we just don't let any of the orange ones breed.
Even if we don't do direct modification of the genotype, we set the selection pressure dial on 11, we aim for goals no natural environment without us being in control would ever produce, and we work hard, although not always successfully in the longer run, to keep that level of pressure from shutting down the operation before we get to our goal.
I've risen to your challenge - unfortunately, the idiot detector I've designed only works if the person has a Slashdot ID. It is, however 100% reliable at spotting that particualr self confessed idiot, and has no false positives, and runs on mammalian grade hardware. I'll need a grant to expand the system. Oh, and your sig is 'overrated', or I disagree with it, or maybe both. (Your post is fine, just the sig). "Overated is a set, which overlaps in part with the set of "I disagree", in classic Venn diagram A-AB-B fashion. That's not identity. Now, why don't I want to let you get on an airplane?
I appreciate the putting of Christians in quotes, but really, if we got rid of all the racists, we could probably work with all the ignorant that remain, and I doubt any remaining non-racist and less ignorant people who call themselves "Christians" without at least understanding the story of the Good Samaritan, would be a large enough group to matter. Hey, are we sure the remaining racists can't grow out of it? How about we just fix America (and anywhere else) until they are such heavens the racists want to move elsewhere on their own?
(Hey, my big invisible sky guy wants me to treat everybody as I would like to be treated. On a cycle that was invented way before, by the big invisible moon lady, he's gonna' be reborn again to beat the big invisible guy with the scythe, and remind us all death is no big deal. Oh, and he took over the big invisible underearth guy with the adversarial job's position (you know, the b.i.u.g some say has horns and a pitchfork), so there's no one left to accuse you before my big invisble sky guy's dad. I would add that my big invisible sky guy wasn't born yesterday, but, uhm, now's not a good day for that - they moved the party to when all the older big invisibles had a solstice holiday, I swear).
I agree that he should have been spotted as a potential threat. The one way ticket itself is supposed to be a red flag.
But as for the eventually they will get it right part of your argument...
So, we all know there's no negative consequences to them to keep practiceing till they get it right? So, having their agent set his lap on fire and having to have it stomped out isn't a publicity loss for them? There's nobody over there now thinking "Why should I give my hard earned petrodollars to a bunch of clowns?"?
You're manufacturing the failure of your own side. Arguing that Al-Quaeda can suffer an effectively unlimited number of bonehead stupid failures while the rest of the world won't lose respect for them in the process gives them a victory they can't honestly earn. Even that, assumes this fool actually got any help from any real terrorist organization.
An idiot just set his own lap on fire. If Al-Quaeda's goal really is a resurgence of Islam, he just provided a great counterargument - that Islam has become the religion of the Three Stooges. "Hi There, I'm Larryoma and this is my brother Darylhammad, and this is my other brother Darylhammad.". This is not what Islam deserves, but it is not the West that will cause many people to lose respect, it is the terrorists themselves who are hurting Islam. Al-quaeda, not anybody else, has just set respectful recognition of Islam in the West back another decade or so. (Again, assuming that the moron actually had organized help). If I was an Al-Quaeda spokesman right now, I'd be denying that the idiot was ever one of my trainees, unless there's so much proof to come out that they can't.
OK, I'll bite. Why is it ludicrous for DNS requests to go outside the tier of your ISP? Why did you bother to specify the tier, as opposed to you saying, for example, DNS should be handled by the ISP and go no further? I'm inferring here that you are including an ISP's peers as on the same tier, or something like that, and all I can see is that there are some good arguments for doing it either way, and you've really got me wondering what's so obviously flawed about one side of the debate that it settles the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If there are not many planets that show signs of possible life at all, then there are going to be very few where life has even possibly developed our kind of intelligence. There would be even fewer where there might be a technological civilization. Looking for a signal or sending one becomes a real needle in a haystack operation. If we could afford to send just a few signals, say by high powered laser, there would still be no point in funding it, because we would still need to send those signals to literally tens of thousands of near stars just because we haven't narrowed our search. If we could only afford to listen, we might be deciding to commit to a project that would have to run for hundreds of years, and the human race has been pretty reluctant to try such long term feats, and not real good at keeping civilizations going long enough to finish them.
On the other hand, if planets in vital zones are common, designing instruments to specifically look for signs of life on them makes more sense. If we find evidence of life, we can then look at other, easier to detect factors, such as how old the related stars are, and we end up with a list of places that might have advanced lifeforms with intelligence, and even technology such as radio. There's a fair chance we could work through that list in just a few years. It becomes a small enough project we could tackle it with what resources we have, and the people who start the project would live long enough to see the answers.
The payoff could still be huge! Just as huge as a more scattershot approach, for much less time and money. Imagine if we found ourselves talking with a civilization that had already figured out fusion power, or foolproof ways to keep nuclear war from happening, or some other technology we won't invent by ourselves for a hundred years, a thousand years, or more. That's the potential big payout. The next tier down might be things such as just finding a civilization that has already passed through a long industrial pollution phase and cleaned up its old toxic waste dumps and such. Just knowing that they managed not to kill themselves off with some of the things we worry about is pretty valuable even if we don't know the details. Maybe we find aliens that are really good at physics, but don't know as much about industrial chemistry as we do. They want to trade how to make flying cars for our advanced secrets of how to make paint that weathers well in sunlight.
You do realize that saying only blithering idiots would do it (while true) doesn't mean it didn't happen?
There is no POV that developed in a vacuum, only to become fixed when its child died of a hard drug addiction. There certainly are people who have lost loved ones that way, but they have also been told, ever since old dragnet episodes, that LSD, Psilocybin, and even Pot, are addictive and lethal narcotics just like the Heroin that killed their loved one.
Of course there's need to respect other people's POV's in a general sense, but all POVs are not remotely equal. If you are one one side or the other of a debate about rockets vrs space elevators, and some party enters the debate SHOUTING ABOUT GETTING TO THE MOON ON GIANT SWANS,, your first goal is not to accept the validity of that POV, it's to get the moron to either stop shouting the rest of the debate down or get educated fast, or both.
Right now, Organized Crime LOVES the drug laws we have. They know how to exploit loopholes that keep their own employees in line and use the laws to go after their less organized competition. Every single person shouting for tougher drug enforcement is inadvertently standing next to a Mob boss, Mafia chief, or other racketeer, and giving them support. Now just how far should people who have figured this part out go in respecting the POV of the ones that haven't?
Of course, the blanket pro legalization group has as many idiots as the blanket anti side, and I'm not personally advocating blanket legalization at all, but these people are not really doing the shouting, just sounding like stoned freaks who end up obscuring the rationalists on their putative side. If we shouldn't respect the Cheeches and Chongs out there, we should have even less respect for those who are still shouting "Tougher drug laws are the answer!"
One major branch of Buddhism doesn't see any need for gods - That's the Theravadist position. Do the meditation, get off the wheel. Mahayanists would probably say Theravada is good prep for moving into the full Mahayana tradition, and gods are part of the package but the goal is not to become a god but to become enlightened and then go back to get everyone else there. Vajrayanists would generally say there are gods, and then teach you how to make them useful tools for going further if that's needful, but the goal is not to become a magician that can command even gods, but to get enlightned and then make the decision whether to go back and help everyone else or not, except if you can make the decision, you already know which way you will decide.
Theravadists mostly (not all), think the other branches have gotten into too complex models. So does Zen, except that Zen is mostly founded on Mahayana, and wants to avoid throwing out universal compassion with the bath water.
Some practicing Buddhists out there, feel free to shoot me down on this.
All right, I will prove right here that one god exists, hows that? (Although it's not one I'm particularly a follower of, just somebody else's god).
Apollo, Greek god of the Sun exists: Proof: For close to a thousand years, Apollo was seen as the god of harmony among other attributes such as music and solar light. His priests took their advice from adolescent girls who stayed in a cave, breathing fumes of various hallucinogenic plants, and then revealing their visions, and their visions controlled practically the whole civilization. In any normal situation, this would have been a ridiculous form of government. It would have lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes and never been considered again after the debacle that resulted. Unless a divine spirit of harmony acted through these stoned children, we would think of ancient Greece as just another bunch of peasants, not a center of enlightenment that gave us much of what is best about modern civilization and remains as stories of a golden age we should aspire to. Ergo, the god Apollo exists (or at least existed). The alternative is to believe Stoned Hippy Chicks babbling their dreams make the best form of government, and this is a clear case by Occam.
The problem with that is, if you assembled a typical jury, and polled them on the question "Should mrlibertarian accept the existence of God and more specifically become a Christian?" They would probably vote yes.
Plus a jury just has to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the evidence is sufficient to make whatever the prosecutions posits as an explanation is likelier than the invisible friend alternative. Probabable, not absolute.
There is a specific logical fallacy involved in trying to prove a universal negative. Formally, that fallacy is limited to certain circumstances and certain meanings of the word universal, but still, it's on the standard list of logical fallacies along with 'begging the question' and 'straw-man attacks'. There is no fallacy of assertion of universal positives on the standard lists. So the answer to your question is "Yes, that rule doesn't apply to universal positives".
Also, it would not be 'ironic' even if you had been otherwise right.
Your post is full of factual errors.
Back when the bible was written, planets were most certainly not unknown. The Hebrews even at the time they wrote the Torah were well aware of the same planets the Greeks, Romans and before them the Egyptians and Sumerians recognized.
The Vatican hasn't constantly denied the existence of extraterrestrial life. They started denying the existence of extraterrestrial life during the counter-reformation. (from about 1545). The Vatican itself existed for at least 400 years before that time (founding estimated 1210), and the Roman Catholic Church for much longer.
The most explicit offical denial came as part of the trial of Geordano Bruno in 1600. Bruno has often been described as a martyr to scientific thought, but it's worth noting that the church judges did not find Bruno's claims of a heliocentric cosmos or planets around other stars, or even life on such worlds, as grounds for his conviction and execution. The actual sentence cites Bruno's expression of pantheism as the only position actually, clearly heretical and worth execution.
The Vatican isn't just now revising its stance on extraterrestrial life due to exoplanet discoveries - It rejected the positions of the counter-reformation as early as 1648, presumably including the denial of the posibility of extra terrestrials along with the rest of the things it threw out. It officially specifically allowed blanket publication of opinions on the subject by priests to the general public before 1950, resulting in several popular books, for example by Ftr. A Zubak in 1954. LeMatre published arguments as early as 1927 in the same paper where he described the formation of the universe from a monobloc of infinite density (the earliest form of the Big Bang theory) although as a good Catholic he put some of his notes through church review first. By all accounts, it was a pro forma review, even with ideas as
spectacular as the Big Bang being proposed.
Note: I'm not a practicing Roman Catholic, nor was I raised as one.
Just think of how much value there might be if someone decided to shoot a film that was set up with multiple cliffhangers like an old republic serial, and they had less worry that they might be sued by the holders of Raiders?
Over-broad and over-extended copyright means when Peter Jackson gets interested in remaking King Kong, he has to worry about model dinosaurs that either have construction or markings too similar to Jurassic Park. He can't just call on an expert and try to make the most accurate T-Rex possible, he has to sweat what could happen legally if the 'most accurate' looks too much like someone else's T-Rex. this is on top of filming a depression era scene or twenty while having to pay someone to check that all the music used is public domain because some tune in the background just might still be protected. Remember in Kong how the 'studly' actor puts up posters of his earlier films on his cabin's walls? Those fictitious prop pieces had to be checked out by a legal department to see they were not too similar to any real film posters, because something might be still under copyright. How much do things such as this add to a film's costs?
The prevailing evidence is that the Moon is liberally covered with large round or roundish impressions, and yet there are still people arguing that there's no evidence Elephants have never set foot on the moon. Go figure!
(Insert link detailing the sad lack of science education in the US).
Bacteria mutate faster than humans - that's not the same as evolving faster, and in fact can be the opposite.
1. Evolution happens because tiny, cumulative mutations can sometimes be advantageous. Big mutations almost never are - for some sizes of 'big' make that absolutely never. Humans, with 30,000 genes or so, can have many mutations that are tiny effects, so a few will be positive. Bacteria, often with only a few hundred genes, are stuck where almost any change is relatively big, so most of their mutations are negative to lethal (99.99999999% or so, as opposed to only about 99% for big multicelled complex things.).
2. Nature seems to be trying to make copying the reproductive code more accurate. The 'higher' plants and animals have much more error correcting applied to their DNA than less complex organisms. In fact, such 'steps forward' as sexual reproduction and keeping the DNA in the center of a nucleus, farther from some chemical agents that commonly damage it, all seem to reflect a trend in evolution towards reducing copying errors. However, the time that a species of advanced organism gives way to a successor looks shorter than for a 'primative organism', not longer. So more reliable copying, with fewer mistakes, must actually speed up species change, not slow it down.
This sounds counter to common sense - how can this be? Well, for just one factor, if you were a mutant, with an advantageous gene, it would probably only be a very small advantage (like I said in point 1). So for it to prove itself, it would take not just you having some slight benefits from it, but your kids, grandkids, and so on, over many generations. Now what happens if mutations are so frequent that the slightly better gene gets overwritten by new mutations before it has enough time to prove itself? Bingo, it can't be selected for - a higher mutation rate means less of the selection part of evolution.
(As I said, this is just one factor - a good college textbook on Evolution will likely mention several other arguments along this general line).
Real scientists have tried to calculate just how high a mutation rate actually slows down selection, and the best guess is even the most complex life forms are still evolving more slowly than they would with better error correction or a lower background radiation rate or other such factors. We (and the Oaks and Emus) are still evolving more slowly than the theoretical maximum with really tight error correction.
"OK, I need all you zombies to go over there and stand next to the propane tank. Yeah, hold hands and sing Kum-bi-Brainsi-yah or something. That's good."
Well, there wouldn't be much point in exponential penalties for multiple cases, would there?
I think you're failing to see how the steps in the process differ from physical invention: It's not that software is implemented based on predefined components, it's a question of where creativity is possible in the process (I'm using creativity in a broad sense, to include the word invention itself, and words such as 'originality' and even 'non-obviousness' when they are used to describe the patent process. I'll try to use some of those more specific terms to make this a little clearer).
As post #30588846 put it, the assembly of code is done in preconcieved ways. Someone already built a hardware framework that controls what you can create in software for a given purpose at one set of levels (essentially the bottommost levels - you can't, for example, make a deliberate spelling mistake to make a pun or coin a new word to create something novel and previously unforseen, as the system treats these as mistakes which won't execute). There are many non-obvious but still useful ways to arrange a very complex set of logic gates to make a processor, ergo that is patentable (or some parts of it are). There are no similarly non-obvious ways to arrange assembly language commands - A C, L, or ST, or even an SSCH does what it does, and its permissible uses are all documented. When you program above machine and assembly languages, you can't rearrange these to your own taste, as you can't even normally see them.
At the next set of levels, someone has created a programming language you are using. Unlike a natural language, it too is a very rigidly defined framework. Some choices may seem to be available, but there is often a precise ranking possible, in that one algorythm may be clearly superior to all others for the purpose. Doing something deliberately different is mostly also doing something deliberately inefficient, against standard, or just plain wrong. At neither of these two sets of levels can you actually do much if anything significantly creative. You also can't protect that level by patent because the legal system already forbids protecting the mathematics on which your work is based, and your implementation is a derivitive work of the sphere of math, so it can't have rights the math itself doesn't have.
Above that second set of levels, yes programming can be creative. But there, you're describing something similar to writing in a natural language. It's normally already protectable by copyright and so shouldn't gain simultanious protection from patent law. Some choices here are non-obvious, but non-obvious in more like the same way as choosing to use adjectives more sparingly and make the red-headed character be from out of state, not so much non-obvious in the 'tungsten makes a durable filament' manner.
I'm not saying I actually agree with all this, mind you. I think one of the points of both open ended scripting languages and of OOP is to make genuine creative choice available at deeper levels of the process. But, the court system is thinking of programming mostly as it was 20 or more years ago.
But if the judge cited copyright law as authority in his ruling, or even just agreed to accept a motion based on copyright arguments, that's simply not within his authority unless he's federal. Copyright law is federal only and the authority cannot be delegated even by act of congress, so sayeth SCOTUS.
I always though people bold parts of a definition because definitions are often complex, and in particular, have conditional parts. The definition you're addressing does have such parts (i.e. "often racism" and arguably ".etc"). You may note that Azaris boldfaced one of the conditional parts, and if you leave off that optional 'racism' part, is making the argument that there's no aggressive nationalism going on around here that could lend support to the definition of fascism being true now. Rather an odd claim to make, isn't that?
Regimenting industry means what it means. Taken at the most literal, it means something like arranging industries so they fall into neat groupings. I think "for the purposes of the arranger" is pretty much a 'gimmee' there, so if the arranger is the government, it moves a shade towards your 'taking control', but that's not exactly 100% overlap with the variation you propose.
Would you agree that there are a lot of people who move back and forth from industry boardrooms to government positions, often repeatedly? How do you tell industry taking control of government from government taking control of industry, when it's really the same people acting in the same way as they shift locations? Right now, Dick Cheney is reaping the benefits as a private citizen that began when he was secretary of Defense (if not earlier), were implemented in part while he was a board member of Haliburton up to 2000, and were still being developed during the period he re-entered public office as Veep.
You might want to study the German and Italian cases, as that's exactly the sort of thing that happened there - highly placed officials either moving back and forth from industry to government or using transparent proxies such as close relatives to control such industries while remaining in government (or vice versa). Don't worry about whether a given regimentation starts in industry or government, look at the people who drive the changes, what they want, and where they are going.
You know, Eisenhower didn't coin the phrase "Military-Industrial Complex" so people could still demand that it all originate with one side or the other. The whole point is they are blended together too much to know which initiatives start with the official government and which start elsewhere.
So, if companies are required to apply the same exaggerated requirements for skill-sets after they can't fill the job with US workers, and apply for the H1B process, then there's no reason to exaggerate. Ergo, listings such as "14 years experience with .Net 2.0 environment running on Core 2 quad processors" shouldn't exist (except as the result of very occasional typos). Yet, they do, in abundance.
Analogy: Fox news has labeled 18 republicans caught in affairs, homosexual encounters, or criminal acts as democrats. They have never made the same mistake in reverse. If you wanted to take the position that Fox wasn't motivated to do this deliberately, shouldn't the burden of proof fall to you to show how such a statistically one sided result could be caused by random typos, or otherwise not be proof of deliberate intent?
You somehow managed to build your point three out of ignoring that fact (unless. by "more skilled" you really meant 'have invented time machines to somehow acquire the necessary skills').
Point 2, on salaries, becomes unsupportable if your point 3 is wrong. If the job requirements can change drastically during the process of 'proving' an H1B is needed, then the government requirement has no teeth. So, you'd have to put up some actual figures about pay for broader classes of programmers rather than specific jobs. You certainly could gather figures and then make the claim that those '30% salaries' are an infrequent anomaly, but the other side has already gathered figures and made the claim that programmer wages have been depressed, as a whole, compared to other skilled professions. If the flat salaries situation exists, and low salaries in H1B positions exist, don't you have some proving to do? Sounds like you need to not only show that the mechanisms by which hiring at below prevailing rates affects related wages wouldn't be enough to depress wages in the broader industry as much as they allegedly have - you'd need to suggest some other causes.
I understand how you must feel about the characterizations to which you are responding. Unfortunately, you've made several unsupported claims, and given your very first sentence, you've done harm to your cause.
Apparently, he is claiming that copyright law should override contract law, and he's willing to urge suicide on people to make his point. Mickey, when somebody proudly announces that all the baby seals should be beaten to death with the bodies of the dead baby polar bears, they are a troll. Please don't feed the trolls.
Sounds like you need it in Smoots!
Please see what I already posted to this thread. Human artifical selection is significantly different from natural selection in at least the two respects I cited. If human forethought is capable of mattering, we also can aim at a goal that isn't immediately optimum but might be better in some larger sense, and natural selection is always aiming solely at a local optimum, so that's a possible third difference. Natural selection tends towards the immediate good enough even if this closes off paths that might later lead to a long term best. (Some people would argue with human purposefullness making any difference in the world. I'm admittedly assuming that point here).
That's one way of looking at it, but: .99 offspring while the fitter competitor has 1.01. Yes, sometimes an exceptionally fit creature hogs reproductive success and has 20 offspring while none of the competitors have any, but that's actually quite rare, and for the majority of species, makes little difference to the aggregate results.
Nature doesn't really do the survival of the fittest, but of the adequately fit. On average. you see a lot more creatures gradually selected around a pretty broad average type, than you do intensely hyper-fit competitors playing an all or nothing game. Nature lets plenty of moderately fit members of a species survive most of the time, and being less fit than average often only means an organism has, on average
Look at bighorn sheep. The males duel, prove their fitness exaustively, though rarely lethally, then the females just as often choose to mate with the losers instead. A bighorn male can win a lot of duels and still achieve only average reproductive success, and conversely, choosing to back down and let the bigger ram show off for the ladies often results in them watching the show, then picking the ram smart enough to know his limitations. Nature seems to allow just about anything to pass as fitness there, but the sheep have been naturally selected for an aggressive mating ritual anyway. For years, scientists assumed there was a lot of selection pressure there, and it was even the common textbook example of how sexual selection could probably modify a species more powerfully than other forms of natural selection, then they finally noticed the ewes weren't really exerting that pressure at all.
Nature also throws out environmental mods nothing can survive. Close enough to an asteroid strike or a shield volcano eruption, no creature proves to have the bit of extra fitness to cope.
Artificial selection is different here. Normally, we deliberately don't wipe out an entire animal population as part of a breeding program, without saving at least some percentage each generation. We also don't let a species just mosey along. If we want really big horns on sheep, we don't let the ewes pick, we choose for them, It's 100% enforcement of the rule that only the absolutely fittest survive, with us setting the definition of fittest as we arbitrarily choose. When we decide that fittest means, for example, the blue ones, we just don't let any of the orange ones breed.
Even if we don't do direct modification of the genotype, we set the selection pressure dial on 11, we aim for goals no natural environment without us being in control would ever produce, and we work hard, although not always successfully in the longer run, to keep that level of pressure from shutting down the operation before we get to our goal.
I've risen to your challenge - unfortunately, the idiot detector I've designed only works if the person has a Slashdot ID. It is, however 100% reliable at spotting that particualr self confessed idiot, and has no false positives, and runs on mammalian grade hardware. I'll need a grant to expand the system.
Oh, and your sig is 'overrated', or I disagree with it, or maybe both. (Your post is fine, just the sig). "Overated is a set, which overlaps in part with the set of "I disagree", in classic Venn diagram A-AB-B fashion. That's not identity. Now, why don't I want to let you get on an airplane?
I appreciate the putting of Christians in quotes, but really, if we got rid of all the racists, we could probably work with all the ignorant that remain, and I doubt any remaining non-racist and less ignorant people who call themselves "Christians" without at least understanding the story of the Good Samaritan, would be a large enough group to matter. Hey, are we sure the remaining racists can't grow out of it? How about we just fix America (and anywhere else) until they are such heavens the racists want to move elsewhere on their own?
(Hey, my big invisible sky guy wants me to treat everybody as I would like to be treated. On a cycle that was invented way before, by the big invisible moon lady, he's gonna' be reborn again to beat the big invisible guy with the scythe, and remind us all death is no big deal. Oh, and he took over the big invisible underearth guy with the adversarial job's position (you know, the b.i.u.g some say has horns and a pitchfork), so there's no one left to accuse you before my big invisble sky guy's dad. I would add that my big invisible sky guy wasn't born yesterday, but, uhm, now's not a good day for that - they moved the party to when all the older big invisibles had a solstice holiday, I swear).
I agree that he should have been spotted as a potential threat. The one way ticket itself is supposed to be a red flag.
But as for the eventually they will get it right part of your argument...
So, we all know there's no negative consequences to them to keep practiceing till they get it right? So, having their agent set his lap on fire and having to have it stomped out isn't a publicity loss for them? There's nobody over there now thinking "Why should I give my hard earned petrodollars to a bunch of clowns?"?
You're manufacturing the failure of your own side. Arguing that Al-Quaeda can suffer an effectively unlimited number of bonehead stupid failures while the rest of the world won't lose respect for them in the process gives them a victory they can't honestly earn. Even that, assumes this fool actually got any help from any real terrorist organization.
An idiot just set his own lap on fire. If Al-Quaeda's goal really is a resurgence of Islam, he just provided a great counterargument - that Islam has become the religion of the Three Stooges. "Hi There, I'm Larryoma and this is my brother Darylhammad, and this is my other brother Darylhammad.". This is not what Islam deserves, but it is not the West that will cause many people to lose respect, it is the terrorists themselves who are hurting Islam. Al-quaeda, not anybody else, has just set respectful recognition of Islam in the West back another decade or so. (Again, assuming that the moron actually had organized help). If I was an Al-Quaeda spokesman right now, I'd be denying that the idiot was ever one of my trainees, unless there's so much proof to come out that they can't.
OK, I'll bite. Why is it ludicrous for DNS requests to go outside the tier of your ISP? Why did you bother to specify the tier, as opposed to you saying, for example, DNS should be handled by the ISP and go no further? I'm inferring here that you are including an ISP's peers as on the same tier, or something like that, and all I can see is that there are some good arguments for doing it either way, and you've really got me wondering what's so obviously flawed about one side of the debate that it settles the whole thing.